Managing Reviews

GMBMantra pulls every review from your Google Business Profile into one inbox where you can reply by hand, generate an AI draft to edit, or let auto-reply handle straightforward cases. Reviews are scoped to the location you've picked in the top bar, sorted newest first by default, and stay in sync with Google on a nightly cadence (plus whenever you hit Refresh or Sync New).

The same page also surfaces sentiment, rating distribution, response rate, and trend charts — but the heart of it is the inbox at /reviews. Below is how each reply path works and where the AI deliberately steps back so you can take over.

How to Reply

1. 1

   Open the reviews inbox

   Go to /reviews and pick the location from the top-bar picker. The Google Reviews tab lists every review for that location, with the customer's star rating, their comment, and when the review came in on each card.

2. 2

   Filter to what matters

   Use Filter by rating (1-5 stars, or all) and Filter by response (No Response, Has Response, Deleted from Google, or all) to narrow down. The most common workflow: set response to No Response to see only pending reviews. The search box matches against review text, and the sort toggle flips newest/oldest.

3. 3

   Reply manually OR ask AI for a draft

   Click Reply on any review card. You can either type your response directly, or click Ask Mantra to generate an AI draft based on the review's text, star rating, and your brand voice. AI drafts cost 5 credits each; typing one yourself is free.

4. 4

   Review, edit, and post

   The draft drops into the reply box where you can edit every word before sending. Click Submit to post — the reply is saved on that review and pushed back to Google. The reply shows up under the review immediately.

5. 5

   (Optional) Configure auto-reply for hands-off handling

   If you'd rather not touch every positive review, open /settings/ai → Auto-respond to 4 & 5 star reviews and toggle it on. Mantra will draft and post replies to 4-5 star reviews in your brand voice without asking. You can cap volume with Max Replies Per Hour (default 2). Negative reviews follow a different rule — see Key Concepts below.

Key Concepts

A reply gates "pending"

A review is pending when no reply has been posted yet — nobody (you, your team, or Mantra AI) has replied. The pending count on the dashboard, the No Response filter on /reviews, and the ?filter=no_response deep link all key off this same state. Once you post a reply, the review drops out of the pending bucket. Already-replied reviews are never re-drafted and never re-replied — Mantra checks whether a reply already exists before doing anything.

Rating buckets: 1-3 = negative, 4-5 = positive

The system classifies reviews by star rating. 4 and 5 stars are positive (eligible for auto-reply when you turn it on); 1, 2, and 3 stars are negative (handled separately, see below). Sentiment AI also tags every review as positive / negative / neutral / mixed for the analytics charts, but the auto-reply gate runs on raw star rating, not sentiment.

The negative-review approval gate

/settings/ai has a toggle called Require approval for negative reviews. It defaults to on, and here's exactly what happens in each state:

• On (default): When a 1-3 star review comes in, Mantra does not generate a draft at all. There's no approval UI yet, so a draft would just sit in a queue forever — instead the system skips generation and doesn't burn the 5 credits. You reply manually from /reviews.
• Off: Mantra auto-generates and auto-posts a reply to negative reviews, same flow as positive reviews. Use this only if you trust the brand voice enough to send unsupervised replies to unhappy customers.

If you want a human in the loop on negatives, leave approval-required on and reply manually — that's the supported path today.

Brand voice controls AI tone

Every AI-generated draft (manual Ask Mantra or auto-reply) runs through the brand voice settings configured per-location at /settings/ai → Brand Voice. You set tone (Professional & Friendly, Casual, Formal, Enthusiastic, Friendly, or Custom), response length (Brief / Medium / Detailed), languages, business context, and any custom instructions ("always mention our 24-hour guarantee", "never name competitors"). Each location can have its own voice.

Frequently Asked

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